Rivers and conflict

Streams of blood, or streams

of peace
May 1st 2008 | NAIROBI
From The Economist print edition

Talk of thirsty armies marching to battle

is surely overdone, but violence and
drought can easily go together

NHPA

WHEN Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, was asked to ponder

the future of the world before an audience of powerful businessmen
and politicians, at a meeting in Switzerland earlier this year, he could
have chosen any topic he liked. What he focused on was both a hoary
old favourite, and a newly popular preoccupation, of debates on world
affairs: the rising risk of wars over fresh water, as populations
increase and the world gets drier.

“As the global economy grows, so will its thirst...many more conflicts
lie over the horizon,” he said, after deploring the fact that “too often,
where we need water, we find guns.” Mr Ban wasn't the first to sound
the alarm. In 2006 John Reid, who was then British defence
secretary, triggered headlines such as “Water wars loom” after
disclosing that a unit at his ministry was preparing for a world of
battles over life's most basic necessity. And warnings have been
issued by people closer to the edge of contested waters. After making
peace with Israel in 1979, the late President Anwar Sadat said that
henceforth Egypt would not wage war, except over water.

But is the idea of countries marching to battle to get water, or to

defend it, really plausible? Researchers at Oregon State University
say they have found evidence to the contrary, showing that the
world's 263 trans-boundary rivers (whose basins cover nearly half the
land surface of the world) generate more co-operation than conflict.
Over the past half-century, 400 treaties had been concluded over the
use of rivers. Of the 37 incidents that involved violence, 30 occurred
in the dry and bitterly contested region formed by Israel and its
neighbours, where the upper end of the Jordan river was hotly
disputed, and skirmished over, before Israel took control in the 1967
war. And some inter-state water treaties are very robust. The Indus
river pact between India and Pakistan survived two wars and the
deep crisis of 2002.

Where the doom-mongers do have a point is this: drought,

desertification and food shortage are among the factors that foment
conflict within states by tipping some areas, at least, into social
collapse. The drying up of old grazing lands, once shared by Arab
herders and African farmers, is one of the things that pushed Sudan's
west into chaos and misery.

But what about war between nations that more-or-less function? For
anyone who takes a cynical view of the causes of war, water seems a
less likely agent than say, oil or diamonds. For dictators or warlords
(the sort who sponsored or prolonged ghastly wars in Congo and
Angola), water is less enticing than minerals or gems. It is harder to
steal and sell.

But conflicts of interest over water can certainly poison inter-state

relations, even when an imbalance of power is so great that the
aggrieved party could never consider using force. Mark Zeitoun, a
Canadian scholar at the London School of Economics, says rivers
provide a perfect case of “asymmetrical co-operation” between
countries that are forced to work together on terms dictated by the
strongest. Take the Nile, where the main riparian states, Egypt,
Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia, or their colonial masters have been
watching each other's water use closely for a century at least—and
Egypt usually gets its way.

The Nile is vast. Geographers still argue over exactly where the White
Nile rises. Its tributaries and tendrils extend over a tenth of Africa's
surface, and 160m people live in the river basin, in ten countries.
That number is predicted to double within a few decades. These
pressures, and Egypt's record of posturing and occasional threats,
have been cited by some as a harbinger of war.
Under successive regimes, Egypt has been protective of a 1959
agreement that divides the uses of the lower Nile between itself and
Sudan. It has used its diplomatic muscle, and its influence at the
World Bank, to prevent any water projects in Ethiopia that would
restrict the river's flow.

A wild card, these days, is China, which is unconstrained by World

Bank diplomacy and would enrage Egypt if it ever helped the
Ethiopians divert part of the Blue Nile to agriculture. Even as Egypt
has softened its public stance and reached out to its riparian
partners, its intelligence is active in the Horn of Africa.

Still, no medium-sized country in its right mind would fight China

over water, whether the dispute was far from the Middle Kingdom or
right on its borders.

There is certainly a mounting conflict of interest between China and

some neighbours over the use of two rivers that rise in Xinjiang, a
region that the government in Beijing wants to develop and populate.
The Chinese have diverted part of the Irtysh river, which feeds
Russia's Ob river and ends up in the Arctic, to a canal supplying the
booming oil town of Karamai. And China is also making more use of
the Ili river, which ends up in Kazakhstan's Lake Balkhash, a vast,
shallow expanse. Perhaps exaggerating, the UN Development
Programme (UNDP) has said Lake Balkhash could turn into a salty
mess, like the Aral Sea; and there are fears that wind-borne salt from
its dried-up basin might speed the melting of glaciers on which China
and Kazakhstan depend. But Kazakhstan (population 15m) won't pick
a fight with 1.3 billion Chinese.

For another “asymmetrical” relationship, take the one between

Turkey, where the Tigris and Euphrates rise, and Syria and Iraq, both
highly dependent on those rivers. Turkey's effort to build up to 22
dams on the two rivers is a constant source of tension, and tempers
flared in 1990 when Turkey briefly interrupted the Euphrates. Turkey
is now anxious to discuss water with the American-backed
government of Iraq; cynics discern an effort to lock in some deals
favourable to the Turks while the Iraqis may be amenable.

What about Israel, a country that (in matters aquatic, as in much

else) views itself as eternally vulnerable while its neighbours often
regard it as a hard-nosed bully? Israel's strategic situation was
transformed after 1967: it no longer had to fight over water, and was
able to co-operate “asymmetrically” with its neighbours in Jordan and
(at least while the Oslo peace accords still worked) the Palestinians.

And as Israel builds up its capacity to turn sea water into fresh, a new
form of co-operation has been proposed. This would involve pumping
desalinated water from the Mediterranean to supply the West Bank—
with the rider that Israel would retain access to a rich underground
aquifer on the West Bank, under the terms of any settlement. This
would lock the Palestinians into deep dependence on Israel.
Some of the gloomiest forecasts of water wars have focused on sub-
Saharan Africa. The ever-cheerful UNDP said in 1999 that the basins
of the Nile, Niger, Volta and Zambezi were all potential flashpoints.
But even in Africa, outright inter-state war over rivers seems unlikely.
As in other places, rivers in Africa often make for more
neighbourliness, not less; the more countries a river passes through,
the greater the regional co-operation. Indeed, as that UNDP report
came out, Namibia and Botswana amicably accepted an international
court ruling over an island in the Chobe river, a tributary of the
Zambezi.

Dripping wet
Recently, there has been progress towards durable water treaties for
several big African river systems, such as the waters that flow down
off the Lesotho highlands. It helps that some of Africa's mightiest
rivers—the Congo, Limpopo and Zambezi—flow through remote and
very wet places. In those climes, the challenge is not how to share
waters, but how to use them at all.

The Niger, by contrast, is shrinking. Nine West African leaders agreed

this week on a 20-year plan to rescue it by reforestation and
removing silt.

Among the Nile basin countries, internationally sponsored initiatives

have drawn hydrologists, economists and diplomats into useful
debates. There is consensus on boosting the efficiency of irrigation,
the main draw on the river. Radical thinkers favour sending “virtual
water” from wetter parts of the basin to drier parts, in the form of
grain and other food.

Still, there are risks. In Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan

and Egypt, the Nile basin has some of Africa's most militaristic
countries. The inability to manage the waters of Lake Victoria, which
is increasing in turbidity, bodes ill for the management of the White
Nile.

If fissile Sudan finally splits, that may also have repercussions for the
Nile. An independent south Sudan would more clearly bisect the
river's African “suppliers” from its Arab “recipients”. Mistrust between
Africans and Arabs could reignite a sense of injustice over colonial-era
agreements between Britain and Egypt, which gave Egypt a generous
share of the Nile waters. Ugandans and Tanzanians say those imperial
bargains left them out.

And yet such talk probably has its limits. An ever-flowing river is hard
to control militarily. Analysts say Uganda and Ethiopia could no more
restrict the Nile's flow than Egypt could invade and defend it. Water
boffins, led by the influential and sober Stockholm International
Water Institute, say the Nile is more likely to see huge inward
investment than cataclysm.

Away from the rivers, the lack of water could produce plenty of
cataclysms for dry Africa. Indeed, if population-growth and climate-
change predictions are anywhere near accurate, the alarmists are
probably right to hit the siren. Local squabbles, with the potential to
spread, are likely to emerge with increasing frequency around fixed
water points, between rival pastoralists or else pastoralists and
farmers. Water “stress” may exacerbate existing separatist struggles;
it may already be doing so in places like Mauritania, Mali and
Ethiopia.

To take two non-African cases, it can be argued that drought helped

fuel the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the original Taliban uprising in
Afghanistan.

Low-level, drought-related skirmishing is especially likely in areas of

small-arms proliferation, such as the Horn of Africa; and in areas
where other fault-lines, like Christian-Muslim tension, also exist.

Already, the annual death toll from battles over water and grazing in
the badlands of south Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya
is in the hundreds. Aid-workers say growing numbers of people and
livestock, escalation from rifles to machineguns, erratic rainfall and
especially the increased rates of evaporation expected in the future
will put the toll into the tens of thousands. That still doesn't add up to
a real war between proper armies—but a thirsty planet is unlikely to
be a stable and peaceful one.